F5 Networks reported its first quarter fiscal 2018 earning on Jan. 24, with new president CEO François Locoh-Donou. Locoh-Donou joined the company in April as the successor to former CEO John McAdam.

For the quarter, F5 reported revenue of $523.2 million, up by 1.4 percent, year-over-year. Net income was reported at $88.4 million, down from $94.2 million from the first quarter of fiscal 2017. Looking forward, F5 has provided guidance for second quarter revenue in a range of $525 million to $535 million.

While F5 initially made its mark with its hardware-based application delivery controller (ADC) appliances, growth is now coming from virtualized editions that are delivered in the cloud.

"During the first quarter, we introduced per application VE (Virtual Edition) offerings supporting traffic management and web application firewall services," Locoh-Donou said during his company's earnings call. "We made platform enhancements that reduced the boot time and footprint of our software by 50 percent for public cloud deployments."

Locoh-Donou added that the F5 platform enhancements are set to be building blocks for improved central management and automation capabilities that F5 will introduce later this year to support elastic provisioning of VE capacity.

"Executing in these areas will extend the number of applications we can address, whether these applications reside on-prem or in the cloud," he said.

The need to be able to address multiple applications across different types of deployment is a trend that is also growing as demand for multi-cloud solutions grow. At a high level, multi-cloud is all about enabling organization to use more than one cloud for application delivery needs.

Locoh-Donou noted that F5's recently released State of Application Delivery report revealed that organizations are embracing multi-cloud, and as part of that, they’re having a sort of best-cloud-for-the-app strategy.

"So they're making decisions on where an app is going to reside on a per-app basis in cloud versus non-cloud," he said. "I think multi-cloud and per-app decision-making around multi-cloud is a trend that we are seeing becoming reality."

Locoh-Donou is also bullish on his firm's security capabilities being a driver for future growth.

"We continue to see strong demand for our security solutions, in particular driven by WAF and the increasing trend towards to encryption of all traffic that we deal with," Locoh-Donou said. "Our SSL capabilities position very well, position us very well to deal with that."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.